You would have to be hiding under a rock if you haven’t heard about the permanent demise of budget airliner Spirit Airlines. After the last of its planes landed at its destination, the shutdown became official at 3:00 am yesterday. That sudden end left passengers, employees and vendors pretty much screwed.
Passengers who for some reason were ignorant of the nation’s biggest news story turned up at airports around the nation, only to find the Spirit Airlines terminals completely empty with only a bland statement in its wake. See, this is what you get when you go ghetto. People are so excited to grab that bargain airfare, but bargain prices are bound to catch up and that’s what happened here.
I don’t feel sorry for anyone involved in the debacle because this story has been brewing in the media for months, then weeks, then days and finally, then nothing. Passengers had plenty of time to book flights elsewhere. Employees, all 17,000 of them, had plenty of time to seek employment elsewhere. Vendors have only themselves to blame for continuing to provide services and supplies knowing that a shutdown was bound to happen.
Yes, I realize that these days, some people are so desperate for bargains that they will abandon logic and common sense. Yes, I understand that the fares were low. It turns out that those fares were so low that the airline simply ran out of steam. I think the final nail in their proverbial coffin was the rising price of fuel during the crisis in and around Iran.
Whatever the last straw was, Spirit is gone now and there’s nothing that can be done about that. However, other budget (“ghetto”) airliners are bound to swoop down and feast at the remains of an airliner who pretty much put itself out of business.
JetBlue, a worthy opponent, seems ready to take advantage of the situation, but all that’s going to do is bite JetBlue in the ass and they will, within the year, shut down unless they raise fares to the point that the company can sustain itself.
I feel no sympathy for the passengers who, for whatever reason, were ignorant of the impending demise. Some whined to local media outlets, screaming about being “screwed” at the top of their dumbass lungs.
You get what you pay for, and Spirit’s idiotic passengers pretty much suffered the consequences of their own greed. I would much rather fly with a financially stable airliner, even if that means paying a wee bit more.
As far as I am aware, the impact on Albany International Airport will be absolutely nothing, because Spirit, to the best of my knowledge, never operated flights to or from the exceedingly small airport that has little to offer. You can see that for yourself when you enter Colonie, a suburb of Albany, and drive past the airport. I would be embarrassed to fly into it, but then again, I’d have to go to NYC, so I guess I could absorb that humiliation.
I do understand that pilots are now out of a job. There are simply not enough slots at other airliners to re-employ them all. That means that highly skilled pilots will quite literally be grounded. I have no sympathy for them as the writing was on the wall for quite some time.
I might feel sorry for the pilots and all of the other employees who made ghetto flights possible if this shutdown came out of nowhere. It isn’t as if pilots and other employees turned up at terminals to find a nasty surprise. When you have plenty of advance warning, you act. Those people did not act.
Now, to be fair, it seems that employees were told in the days and even hours before the shutdown that everything was fine. Just remember, however, that people working in the towers on 9/11 and were told to turn back and return to work. Smart people shoved by those cruel people. Dumb people followed orders like sheep.
Spirit’s employees and the passengers were like the 9/11 folks: they turned around and went going back instead of running away. And look what happened: Spirit’s planes plowed into the grounds of failure. Metaphorically that is.
Much like the people who were dumb enough to work in tall buildings with limited means of escape, the employees and passengers are not victims. Yes, they will be able to file for unemployment, but they will likely get a measly 50% of what they were earning. That’s going to hit a lot of people and their families hard. Still, I do not feel sorry for them because they were being given warnings left and right.
I have no idea how this will impact investment accounts and other benefits. But let’s be honest: they brought this upon themselves. As of the time that this article was published, the 401K website for Spirit employees mentioned nothing of the shutdown per se. However, it displays information regarding rolling over, withdrawing or transferring funds. At least for the moment, employees seem to not be screwed in that regard.
This has nothing to do with the story, but company shutdowns like Enron and many others always fascinate me. Someone has to still be working at corporate headquarters. Final paychecks, of course, have to be processed, unless Spirit decides to abandon payroll just like they abandoned competence. Who is going to be there to process the final paychecks for the people who have to stay behind? The thought is intriguing.
Given that bankruptcy and liquidation is involved, I wouldn’t be holding my breath for my final paycheck, nor payment for my invoices, nor refunds for previously-purchased tickets.
Yes, Spirit made a last-ditch effort to reach a deal with the Trump administration that would have saved the company. In the end, obviously, that failed and as a result, they shut down immediately. The decent thing to do would have been to recognize that the dream is over (or nightmare, if you’re a passenger or employee) and shut down in phases that would have seen them able to warn and assist employees, passengers and, yes, vendors.
And what about the vendors? Spirit is going to attempt to liquidate and I imagine that is where they will be able to meet final payroll and meet their obligations to the vendors. The issue is that you’d have to be a complete idiot to do business with Spirit given that the writing was on the wall months in advance.
If vendors end up being screwed, that would be due to their own idiocy. The minute I saw the ship springing a leak, I would have jumped into a lifeboat and I would have rowed away fast like a black man from paying child support.
Let’s be realistic here. Spirit couldn’t recover from COVID. They filed for bankruptcy, not once, but twice. With a track record like that, why would anyone with a brain want to do business with, work for, or provide goods and services to Spirit? It boggles the mind.
There is a rumor going around that Spirit’s CEO was given a bonus of almost $4 million just one week before the shutdown. If true, that would be a scumbag move on one hand, but on the other hand, no one should blame that CEO for collecting that bonus. I would have, because Mike looks out for Mike. Some might say that he should have returned the retention bonus, but doing that wouldn’t have prevented the shutdown, so I can’t be upset with him for doing what any of us would have done.
This was not a thief in the night shutdown. Yet, people still came to work instead of seeking employment elsewhere. As for the passengers, surely they had plenty of time to book with other airliners. Surely they were watching the news and learned two days ahead of the shutdown that their tickets were about to become expensive scribble pads.
Let the Lord be with the stupid people. And without their Spirit.